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A rich session yesterday. I took much pleasure in the "dance" we made together, as we acted out our initial, then more reflective responses, to the images and poem. Of most interest to me, of course, was the conversation which arose after, with its suggestions for further work, further thinking, further play. I record them here as archive for my own next steps forward, as well as for whatever use they may serve for others:

• Some suggested reading--
  ** Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: on the privileging of "stammering" as philosophy
  ** Hubert Dreyfus, Alchemy and AI (1965), What Computers [Still] Can't Do (1972, 1979, 1991) and Mind Over Machine (1986) -- all critiques of the philosophical foundations of AI

• is it really accurate to say that most of us are "not in touch w/ our frog brains"? perhaps a truer formulation is that all of us are "barely stitching together what is happening in the world"; we are much more froggy than story-capable
• are the two projects--re-thinking world literature and inviting more 'frog brain stammering' into our writing--really congruent? are these two separate projects, one about canon formation, one about how to change up the attention we give, in our composition classes, to the five-paragraph theme?
• let's think some more about how new technologies --platforms like Facebook and Twitter--are playing with different brain functions: do they encourage frog brain writing? or, on the contrary (w/ Twitter cautioning us that "You are 240 characters over your limit. You have to be smarter!") do they require clever re-workings and editings of our initially arising thoughts/
• one participant uses Twitter in his experiemental writing class: students are required to write poems that are self-contained in a single Tweet, as a way of highlighting writings as a series of constraints; it's a very intensive process
• are we ever actually in the presence of frog-brain writing? once we write, haven't we already moved to the storyteller? once we "compose ourselves enough to make a mark," haven't we become storytellers?
• "when I write fiction, I let myself be guided" (what guides you??)
• what about the question of motivation? wherefrom does it arise?
• there are many ways to categorize the different functions of the brain -- left/right; conscious/unconscious; storyteller/frog brain -- and they are not all congruent (are they??)
• let's interrogate also the distinction between the verbal and the gestural: were our gestures "just literal translations of verbal things"? isn't there a range both of gestures and words that are frog-like? that are expressions of the "stream of consciousness"? the gestures felt to @ least one of us "like charades"; getting beyond that level has something to do with the depth with which we interact w/ the material
• how to "be more frog-like"?: is it a practice @ which we can become more adept? is there a temporal quality (taking more time w/ the process)? is it a question of trust? (feeling comfortable w/ your collaborators?) might it have to do with the media (for example, some of us may respond more easily to music)
• what happens if we, a la Wallace Stevens, turn nouns into participial forms: what's the difference, for example, between "I feel free" and "I feel freeing"?
• does learning necessarily mean "coming to a place of articulation"? or is the moment of education marked rather by stammering or silence?
• consider the effects of reading Finnegan's Wake to a child @ bedtime...
• other images of what we are up to: "being in the kitchen"; pilots on autopilot (not making errors by NOT thinking about what they are doing)
• cognitive science and artificial intelligence defines thinking as conscious work (though Dreyfuss, and others like Lakoff and Johnson, "took that apart")
• as academics, we often ignore the "not logical," the stammering, the blushing, the body language w/ which we communicate; how might we slow down our work w/ our students (and colleagues @ conferences like this??), allowing for some more space inbetween what is clearly articulated?
• we ended by articulating a concern that moving into the politically charged arena of world literature with an aim to grasp "more primitive" processes might be a fraught process
• how to re-formulate this? we are accustomed to a certain of telling stories; mightn't we all expand our repertoire?